Thread by @NaomiKritzer

I've said for years that as far as I was concerned, Collin Peterson could keep his seat forever, and if anyone wanted an illustration of why it matters whether an extremely red district has a conservative Dem or a Republican as Rep, Fishbach's got you:

https://twitter.com/gabemschneider/status/1324731982773825537

(This loss was entirely inevitable, that district went OVERWHELMINGLY for Trump four years ago and eventually Peterson was going to retire or die and at that point it was going red and probably never coming back.)

I say "probably" because, well, look at Georgia, for one thing. But also, Amy Klobuchar's popularity extends well outside the metro. Minnesota is kind of a weird state and I don't pretend to be an expert on anything outside the cities themselves.

I'll note that there was a bar graph going around yesterday showing that the Biden vote in Hennepin County, alone, outnumbered all the Trump votes cast in the entire rest of the state. Which, yes, made me chortle.

The thing that concerns me is that it's an invitation to just discard ANY attempt at a rural strategy, and I think that ignoring Greater Minnesota is the wrong thing to do -- both strategically, and because the residents of the 7th are still Minnesotans.

Meanwhile, if the Republicans have ANY sense they're going to take a look at their OWN strategy and consider the fact that they need to stop aggressively alienating the people who live in the Cities if they ever want to win a statewide race again.